Sunday, 25 October 2015

South African student protests and re-emergence of people’s power

The
#nationalshutdown of all major universities in South Africa continues, even
after a historic victory yesterday, when, after several days of mass
mobilisation by students and workers President Jacob Zuma was forced to concede
a zero-percent fee increase in university tuition fees next year. Yet, it was
bittersweet for the more than twelve thousand people who marched to the Union
Buildings in Pretoria who were, once again, tear-gassed and shot at with rubber
bullets and stun grenades. The police turned violent when students began
demanding, after waiting for several hours, that the President address them.
Instead, Zuma chose to speak to the media in a press briefing and leave the
students to the police. In Cape Town, students marched to the airport to show
their solidarity with those in Pretoria; there too police fired rubber bullets,
tear gas, and stun-grenades even as students fled into the neighbouring
residential areas. For many, the victory it is only a partial one, a short-term
solution deferring the problem to another day. It does not resolve the issue of
unaffordable education nor does it address other important issues that the
national action has been tied to like the outsourcing of labour on university
campuses or the general discontents of the lack of transformation at higher
education institutions in the country.

Seven
major universities shut down on October 21st, with more joining the
#nationalshutdown soon after. Massive proposed fee increases of up to 11.5% for
2016, a price hike that would be unaffordable for most students around the
country, called into question the liberatory, and now long forgotten, promises
made by African National Congress (ANC) that education would be free, or at the
very least affordable, after apartheid.

What
began as a sit-in and protest against proposed fee hikes at the University of
Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, soon led to a complete halt of activities on
campus when students called their Vice-Chancellor to a mass meeting. As we
witnessed after the Marikana massacre of striking mineworkers in 2012, the
protests spread like wildfire across the country culminating in a
#nationalshutdown.

Students
in Port Elizabeth, Grahamstown, East London, Johannesburg, Limpopo, and Cape
Town have been met with extremely disproportionate violence from police. The
South African police, who have become infamous for their trigger-happy,
outrageously destructive behaviour, and sinister smiling faces whether they are
killing striking miners, tearing down the homes of people occupying empty land
or firing stun grenades and tear gas at university students, were not deterred
by the outrage on social media or the protests and rational arguments from
students and academics.

Meanwhile
on the morning of Wednesday, 21 October, in the Parliament of the usually quite
serene streets of Cape Town, doors were tied together with cables and couches
were pushed against them as the officials inside became increasingly worried
about the young protesting electorate outside. The students of the University
of Cape Town joined by workers and other supporters had marched to parliament
to demand to see Blade Nzimande, the National Minister of Higher Education. The
fear of the politicians inside, growing by the minute, convinced them of the
need for heavily armed police officers.

A
worried Blade, whose name has inspired all kinds of creative and especially
humourous placards about fee increases and the apparent ‘bluntness’ of his
approach, emerged a few hours later, but failed to get the thousands of
students, chanting “#blademustfall” to ‘cut-it-out’ when he tried to address
them. Instead they threw water bottles at him, and between another favoured
South African expression of dissatisfaction, they booed and told him they were
tired of waiting for his programmes and planning committees and that the
#feesmustfall now.

Hashtags,
by the way, have become so dangerous in South Africa, that in possibly another
first in South African legal history the management of UCT were successful in
attaining a court interdict citing #feesmustfall as a second respondent,
effectively suing a hashtag!

The
protestors, some of whom had convinced some of the university bus-drivers to
take them to parliament shortly before UCT reported the buses stolen, continued
to arrive in their thousands outside parliament. Exercising their democratic
rights, they decided to enter the gates and within minutes, police began firing
stun grenades, tear gas, and rubber bullets into the crowd of students. In what
quickly began to resemble a scene out of 1976 Soweto Uprisings during apartheid
South Africa, 29 students were arrested and six of them were charged with high
treason.

Police
followed fleeing students around the city of Cape Town for half an hour after
they had dispersed, after they had dragged 23 others with a use of force
reminiscent of American policing of black youth, and threw them into the
waiting police vans. In Grahamstown, the police arrived with an ambulance
before the protest had begun. Perhaps the students paused for a quick sigh of
relief; in the case of Marikana, they had been ready with mortuary vans.

The
South African government has left no doubt that its unofficial policy on any
kind of popular mass action is violence. Soon after students had run in fear
and horror from their own police force in Cape Town, the ANC’s official twitter
account commended police for dealing with the “hooliganism” outside parliament,
echoing the congratulatory address former Chief of Police Riah Phiyega to
police officers after they had gunned down 34 mineworkers in Marikana in 2012.

The
framing of students as hooligans, and as violent or irrational protestors, has
not been limited to the ruling party. The mainstream bourgeois liberal media has
taken up this trope with fervour. Rather than reporting on what is a historic
moment for struggles against the corporatisation and neo-liberalisation of the
university, it has chosen instead to focus on the damage caused to property,
the so-called forced entry of students into public spaces, or the disruption of
class and potentially, exams. African universities have long been under attack
through both the neoliberalising forces of structural adjustment policies or
through the general trend of corporatisation that students in Chile, Berkeley,
Quebec, have fought, and won, against.

The
#feemustfall movement, however, must be considered as part of a longer and
deeper struggle when South Africa’s midnight’s children awoke with a start in
the early months of this year.

What
led up to the #feemustfall movement

At
WITS University in Johannesburg, in the last months of 2014, a group of
Politics students released a document titled, “Transformation Memorandum 2014.”
In it, they outlined several of their frustrations with the lack of
transformation within their department, but also within the university as a
whole. Calling WITS a microcosm of South Africa, they said they were alarmed by
the slow progress of transformation in reference to the composition of academic
staff, particularly the lack of black academic staff members especially women.
The South African academy remains dominated by white academic staff; currently
only 14% of professors are black, while the University of Cape Town does not
have a single black female professor. The WITS students also targeted the
untransformed curriculum that did not reflect their lived experiences as black
students, or that the university was part of the African Continent.

While
the transformation memo did create some waves within academic circles, it
wasn’t until March 2015, when a group of students at the University of Cape
Town (UCT) threw buckets of feces on a statue of Cecil John Rhodes on the
campus, that the lack of transformation at higher education institutes started
making headlines. Almost immediately, the Rhodes Must Fall movement (RMF) was
born, calling for the fall of the statue and the beginning of a conversation to
decolonize the university. The movement, which drew thousands of students from
the UCT campuses, to its meetings, started occupying the Bremner building on
the campus renaming it Azania House, the name used by Black Consciousness
anti-apartheid freedom fighters to refer
to South Africa.

Over
the next few weeks, the RMF collective held a series of protests on campus,
posters, performance art, and demonstrations, in the month between 9 March and
the removal of the statue on 9 April, Azania house functioned as headquarters
for all radical activity on the UCT campus. RMF linked their campaign to the
struggle for black liberation in a colonial space, not merely for the students
but also for the black academic staff and the black workers and support staff
on the campus. They used Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko, to define the theoretical
foundations of their movement. Biko founded the Black Consciousness Movement in
1969 during his time as a medical student at the University of Natal and one of
his expressions, ‘Black man you are own your own,’ became a rallying cry for
students and activists alike and highly influenced the student protests of
1976. In addition, midnight’s children or ‘born-frees’ as they are called in
South Africa, added a new and strong feminist dimension to the black liberation
philosophy giving way to a new rallying hashtag: #patriarchymustfall.

Within
a few days on March 17, students at Rhodes University met outside the
university administration buildings on a very cold and rainy Grahamstown day,
in order to show solidarity with the RMF movement at UCT. Students then began
discussing the slow pace of transformation at Rhodes University and their own
pain and frustrations as black students within a neo-colonial institution. The
Black Students Movement was formally constituted on that day and began calling
for the name of Rhodes University to change. Shortly after joining the
revolutionary spirit of the RMF movement, the BSM began organising on campus by
reaching out to black students and staff and occupying the Senate room,
renaming it the BSM Commons.

Only
a few days later, a group called Open Stellenbosch released a statement on
their facebook page, following a demonstration at the historically white
Afrikaaner University, titled, “Who belongs here.” The group of predominantly
black students felt as if they were unwelcome at the university that persisted
in using Afrikaans as the medium of instruction for classes. They defined
themselves according to the tradition of Biko’s black consciousness and as such
in their use of black students, they stressed, was that black be a political
category rather than one tied to pigmentation.

The
TransformWITS movement joined soon after, calling for similar changes to the
institutional culture of the university. Its manifesto, defined the students’
initiative as a non-partisan movement within the Bikoist tradition with an
intersectional approach that rejects liberal notions of respectability politics
when it comes to student practices and protests. The rejection of
respectability politics was something that not only profoundly linked these
movements to Biko’s critique of white liberals and their elite inter-racial tea
parties in the suburbs, but also to the students’ frustration with black
members of management who were considered to be acting against, rather than
for, genuine decolonisation and transformation.

The
students, who have from the beginning displayed an incredible discipline, calm
and intellectual sophistication were, then too, described in the mainstream
media as violent, irrational, hooligans. The charge came not only from racist
quarters, but, perhaps in hindsight not so unsurprisingly, from struggle
veterans and former anti-apartheid student leaders themselves, who told them to
be quiet, study hard and stop complaining because they did not know what real
struggle was about.

The
students, in the face of growing resistance and hostility from university
management, who had as early as April began to routinely call police on
protesting or occupying students, remained defiant continuing in their respective
institutions to call for decolonisation of the university in all its
structures. Within this, they included the neo-liberal practice of outsourcing
labour instituted at UCT as early as 1997. For them, they could not be free
without also recognising the oppression of those around them who were, for
many, not so different from their mothers, brothers, fathers, and sisters. The
student-worker-academic alliance was swift and effective. The unions, and staff
associations soon joined students in calling for the decolonisation of
universities’ under the slogan “Rhodesmustfall.”

A
few months later and once more South Africa’s born-frees, a generation many
would have relegated to the back-burners of history because of their unfortunate
birth into a rainbow nation that afforded them no link to their past and no
definite grasp on their future, entered the stage of history again. This time
with even more courage, perseverance, and commitment than before. This time
they were not content with protests and occupations alone, this time they had
to shut the whole system down and call into question those fundamental freedoms
that, they had been told, were secured just by the timing of their births. Free
education for all was the new call to struggle, and everyone is responding.

At
the moment, thousands of students all over the country are sitting at their
respective universities, holding meetings, strategizing, counselling each
other, studying for exams and bracing themselves for another long day of
resistance. They will be out on the streets again tomorrow loud, defiant, and
accompanied by academics, unionists, support staff, church members and general
supporters.

It
is a moment, which is changing the political and social landscape of South
Africa. The students have not much national direction or co-ordination. They
have not collectively joined any national organisation, political party or
student union, they are drawn from all classes, races and genders of society
and from various political leanings, they have sat together in the thousands,
usually outdoors in most cases, and ate together, sang together, worked
together and faced bullets and tear gas together. Students have also fought,
sometimes with each other, to maintain the focus also on issues of class and
against the perpetuation of cheap black labour as the invisible hands that hold
up the institution. The precarious economic positions of those workers that
withstand the worst of outsourcing practices have also been at the centre of struggles
to transform post-Apartheid institutions into African universities.

There
has been an insistence from the beginning that any struggle for decolonisation
must be intersectional and recognise not only the role played by women, but
that transformation must have gender relations as central tenet. The constant
feminist backlash has kept many movements from collapsing into reliance on
patriarchal or misogynist leaders and leadership styles even if this is an
on-going battle. Perhaps even more inspiring has been the fidelity to
principles and values that foreground the collective spirit and decision
-making practices of these movements. Rejecting and resisting co-optation or
the tendency of management to divide and rule by attempting to single out student
leaders and have private meetings, while remaining disciplined has proved their
maturity and intellect time and time again.

Rather
than dogmatic ideology or party membership, what has linked these movements and
what sustains them is a collective feeling and understanding that something is
terribly wrong in the university, and perhaps the humble assumption that it
has, for a while now, been reflected in the society around and outside it.
Today in Grahamstown students, academics and members of the community will hold
a night vigil for those who have been affected by the recent xenophobic attacks
on mostly, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Ethopian shop-owners. The Unemployed
People’s Movement had informed the police a week prior that they were worried
about rumours circulating amongst people in the township blaming foreigners’
for the recent deaths of some local women. The police had failed to act, they
also failed to stop the looting or protect many of foreign shop –owners and
their families who have now fled the town or are in hiding. Instead, they were
present at the peaceful marches and protests of students on the Rhodes and
Eastern Cape Midlands campuses using tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets
on unarmed students while across town the widespread looting of shops and
violence against foreigners raged on.

There
is no doubt therefore, that what we are witnessing is a revolutionary political
moment in history. Midnight’s children are learning to walk and talk. They are
also learning that they have not been ‘born free,’ and their freedom is
necessarily and inextricably linked to the freedom of those around them. If
sustained, this collective form of politics and mass mobilisation reminiscent
of the 1980s people’s power movements could change the country’s political
trajectory and demonstrate to Zuma and the shadowy figure of what was once the
African National Congress that, as the shackdwellers movement Abahlali
baseMjondolo puts it:

Frantz Fanon

1925 - 1961

This Blog

This blog contains resources directly related to Frantz Fanon's life and work, the secondary literature on Fanon and other resources useful for engaging Fanon's ideas here and now. Some of what is here comes from, or relates to, a particular set of ongoing discussions around Fanon's work in Grahamstown.